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Subject (in Art)

Two distinct, but interrelated, elements of a work of art are the crucial means
of projecting its sense of life: the subject and the style—what an artist
chooses to present and how he presents it.

The subject of an art work expresses a view of man’s existence, while the style
expresses a view of man’s consciousness. The subject reveals an artist’s
metaphysics, the style reveals his psycho-epistemology.

The choice of subject declares what aspects of existence the artist regards as
important—as worthy of being re-created and contemplated. He may choose to
present heroic figures, as exponents of man’s nature—or he may choose
statistical composites of the average, the undistinguished, the mediocre—or he
may choose crawling specimens of depravity. He may present the triumph of
heroes, in fact or in spirit (Victor Hugo), or their struggle (Michelangelo),
or their defeat (Shakespeare). He may present the folks next door: next door to
palaces (Tolstoy), or to drugstores (Sinclair Lewis), or to kitchens (Vermeer),
or to sewers (Zola). He may present monsters as objects of moral denunciation
(Dostoevsky), or as objects of terror (Goya)—or he may demand sympathy for his
monsters, and thus crawl outside the limits of the realm of values, including
esthetic ones.

Whatever the case may be, it is the subject (qualified by the theme) that
projects an art work’s view of man’s place in the universe.

The subject is not the only attribute of art, but it is the fundamental one, it
is the end to which all the others are the means. In most esthetic theories,
however, the end—the subject—is omitted from consideration, and only the
means are regarded as esthetically relevant. Such theories set up a false
dichotomy and claim that a slob portrayed by the technical means of a genius is
preferable to a goddess portrayed by the technique of an amateur. I hold that
both are esthetically offensive; but while the second is merely esthetic
incompetence, the first is an esthetic crime.

There is no dichotomy, no necessary conflict between ends and means. The end
does not justify the means—neither in ethics nor in esthetics. And neither
do the means justify the end: there is no esthetic justification for the
spectacle of Rembrandt’s great artistic skill employed to portray a side of
beef.

That particular painting may be taken as a symbol of everything I am opposed to
in art and in literature. At the age of seven, I could not understand why
anyone would wish to paint or to admire pictures of dead fish, garbage cans or
fat peasant women with triple chins. Today, I understand the psychological
causes of such esthetic phenomena—and the more I understand, the more I oppose
them.

In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style,
must be worthy of each other.

That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.

Misery, disease, disaster, evil, all the negatives of human existence, are
proper subjects of study in life, for the purpose of understanding and
correcting them—but are not proper subjects of contemplation for
contemplation’s sake. In art, and in literature, these negatives are worth
re-creating only in relation to some positive, as a foil, as a contrast, as a
means of stressing the positive—but not as an end in themselves.